LittleAtari wrote:Honestly, I just want the most important features most visible and most accessible. The biggest issue that I have with the current layouts I'm seeing is that things like uploading videos or visiting the forums still arent that visible. I like the general direction and I wouldnt mind changing the color scheme, if it ends up making things better organized. We dont need to be orange and blue.

I'm going to look into messing around with your layout for a bit tonight and see if I can rearrange somethings or something

Thanks for taking a crack at this layout thing

What can I say... I want to do what I can so the org turns out the way people want it .

The biggest change is a navigation menu at the top so you can cycle between all available html's. If you have any questions about changing particular elements, feel free to ask. But by far the easiest to change are the backgrounds for the header, menus, and buttons since they are just .gif files. Simply modify them, then refresh the page. If you want to modify actual site colors, you'll have to open "main.css" and "main_Basic.css" in notepad, then search for the colors you want to change. The main ones being #ff6600 (orange) and #00ccff (blue); ctrl+f and ctrl+h might help. Also, try to use layout 3 (dubbed Big Bento) as your main reference since it contains all features, like an administrative header at the top, statistics in the banner, and the beefiest preview panel. While we might not want to use all these features, it might be nice to know what they would look like if presented differently. Have fun

Here's what I got so far. There's still a lot that I want to tweak and also make it so that it makes sense, but I think this puts out some of the main ideas I've been having.

I'll post a new version tomorrow. If somethings like spacing or font is off, sorry about that, I know nothing about CSS and this was my first time tweaking somethings.

EDIT: somethings I want to add is icons for the alerts that show what the alert is referring to. For example of the alert is for a new upload, it'll have a film strip next to it. If it's a journal alert, it'll have a notepad or something.

Also, I think most people will notice that I've added the forums to the side, which I think will get more people involved in the site socially, but it does put a lot on the main page. I'm thinking that if we can still allow for collapsing and some way of adjusting what we see on the main page, it'll work fine.

I also want to somehow incorporate the recommended videos feature and a spot on the front that catches big site news for when VCAs roll around or for if and when the newsletter comes back or something.

I love the preview they got on the main page! They had something like that back in the old days (like REAL old, 2000-2001 before we got php), only back than it was just a link. This feature is HIGHLY usefull... but... how many of us even use the main page nowadays??